young man sayyid: dreams and biographical texts

Young Man Sayyid: Dreams and Biographical Texts 253

10

Young Man Sayyid: Dreams and

Biographical Texts

DAVID LELYVELD

It was when he was very little, a beardless youth, that he saw some prisoners in

jail uniforms, shackles on their feet, tangled hair on their heads. They were at work,

building a road. That night he dreamed that he was coming from outside into the

women’s quarters. When he got to the threshold of the passageway, there stood

an extremely dark monster with huge teeth, hair standing on end, and shackles on

his feet. The monster came out of the corner and lifting both hands grabbed the

boy up over his head and smashed him down to the ground. He woke from the

dream, but his heart kept pounding for several hours. For a long time after that he

was afraid to pass through the passageway at night unless he had a man to

accompany him.1

When you have a bad dream like that, you are supposed to recite a prayer

seeking God’s protection from Satan, turn left, and spit three times—thu thu

thu kar dena, as Sayyid Ahmad Khan put it in his translation of Shah Waliullah,

who in turn was citing a well-known saying of the

1 Hali, Altaf Husain, “Sir Sayyid ke cand khwab”, Hayat-i Javid (Kanpur: Nami Press, 1901

[1st ed., British Library Rare Books and Mss. 14109.bbb.7], Appendix [separate

pagination], pp. 7–14. Later editions omitted this text, but it was reprinted in Muhammad

Ismai`il Panipati, ed., Maqalat-i Sir Sayyid (Lahore, 1963), Vol. 15, pp. 171–81. The

present chapter is based on the Panipati reprint, but the dreams were not numbered in

the original text. Elsewhere in this chapter, I will refer to HJ, a reprint edition of Hayat-i

Javid (Lahore: Ashrat Publishing House, 1965). I am indebted to Muzaffar Alam for

suggesting that I look at Sir Sayyid’s dreams. I am also grateful to Nasir Ilahi, a

psychoanalyst in New York—and a direct descendant of Maulvi Samiullah Khan—for his

insightful suggestions. My thanks also to Barbara Metcalf, Sandy Freitag, C. M. Naim,

and Ruby Lal for their suggestions.

254 Muslim Voice

Prophet.2 Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi added that you should not tell anyone about

such a dream,3 but we have the text of this one and 11 others because Sayyid

Ahmad Khan wrote them down and passed them on to his biographer Altaf

Husayn Hali. Hali found no way to incorporate these dreams into the

biography but he included them as an appendix to the first edition with the

explanation that Sayyid Ahmad had recorded these dreams in preparation for

his commentary on the 12th sura of the Holy Qur’an—the one about Hazrat

Yusuf, the interpreter of dreams.4 According to Hali, Sayyid Ahmad’s purpose

in recording his dreams, all in the third person, was to examine them for

insights into the nature of dreaming itself, which was a rich, various and much

studied tradition in Islamicate civilization.5 Muslims have made much of

dreams as a medium

2 Khan, Sayyid Ahmad, Tafsir al-qur¼an: va huva al-hady valfurqan (Lahore: Matba»-i

Nawal Kishor, n.d.), Vol. 5, p. 57; (lithograph) as reproduced in Sir Sayyid ki tafsir-i

Qur¼an, Part 2 (Patna: Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, 1995); also available at

http://www.aboutquran.com/ba/bio/sirsyed_ahmed_khan/tqss_vol_05.djvu Originally

published in moveable type by the Aligarh Institute Press, Aligarh, 1309/ 1892 (available

in British Library Rare Books and Mss. System number 013164090). See also SAK to

Mawlawi Sharfuddin, 20 February 1893, in Panipati, ed., Maktubat-

i Sir Sayyid, 2nd edn (Lahore: Majlis-i Taraqqi-i Adab, 1976), Vol. 1, p. 305. The essay

is reproduced without indicating its source and context and without the Quranic text as

“Haqiqat al-ruya” in Muhammad Ismai`il Panipati, Maqalat-i Sir Sayyid, Vol. 13,

pp.222–44. For the hadith in Bukhari, see Vol. 9, Book 87 (Interpretation of

Dreams) Number 115, available at http://darulislam.info/Hadith_Bukhari-

index-action-viewcat-cat-87.html 3 Metcalf, Barbara Daly, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 186.

4 Note by Panipati, Maqalat-i Sir Sayyid, Vol. 15, pp. 171–72.

5 See Fahd, T., and H. Daiber, “Ru¾y”, in P. Bearman et al., eds, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd

edn (Brill, 2009), Hossein, “Al-Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yahya b. Habash b. Amirak, Abu ‘l-

Futuh”, in P. Bearman et al., eds, Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (Brill, 2008), available

at http://www.brillonline.nl; Hermansen, Marcia K., “Dreams and Dreaming in Islam”, in Kelly

Bulkeley, ed., Dreams: A Reader on the Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of

Dreaming (New York: Palgrave 2001),

pp. 73–92; Green, Nile, “The Religious and Cultural Roles of Dreams and Visions in

Islam”, JRAS, Series 3, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2003), pp. 287–313; Ewing, Katherine P., “The

Dream of Spiritual Initiation and the Organization of Self Representations among

Pakistani Sufis”, American Ethnologist, Vol. 17, No. 1 (February 1990), pp. 56–74;

Grunebaum, Gustave E. von, and Roger Caillois, The Dream and Human Societies

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Shulman, David, and Guy G.


for divine revelation—or satanic deception. One’s dreams and the ability

to interpret the dreams of others can establish one’s spiritual aptitude and

authority, often in the context of specific social institutions such as Sufi

shrines. Dreams can reveal truths about everyday life, predict the future

and open the gates of mystical experience. The theological,

philosophical, and mystical traditions of Islam have looked to dreams to

learn about the nature of perception, memory, imagination, emotion, the

boundaries of the self and the experience of love. And it is likely that all

these cultural traditions have fed back into the content of what people

dream and what they do when they wake up.

Sayyid Ahmad’s commentary starts off by saying that much has been

written about dreams but only now has research made significant

progress in studies of “physiology” and “psychology” that cast new light

on the origin and meaning of dreams. He proceeds to a discussion of the

brain, the nervous system and the way perceptions are processed into

images and memories. He then moves on to examine selective

quotations (in Arabic with Urdu translations) from Ibn Sina, Al-Razi and

Shah Wali Allah, all in support of his general proposition that whatever

one dreams must be based on prior experience. Following Shah Wali

Allah, he argues that some people are particularly perceptive and able to

make more of their dreams. If Hazrat Yusuf, for example, was able to

predict famine and plenty, it was because he understood the nature of

Egyptian agriculture and the flood patterns of the Nile River.

Notably absent from this discussion is any mention of his own dreams.

He may have written them in preparation for the Tafsir, but when he sent them

on to Hali, he presumably considered them relevant to his biography. The

dozen dreams are mostly arranged chronologically according to a sequence

of periods in his life and the places he lived— Delhi, Bijnor, Moradabad and

Aligarh. They might be construed as an autobiographical fragment, a narrative

history of Sayyid Ahmad’s inner life. Hali, however, didn’t know what to do

with them; he confined them to an appendix in the first edition, and dropped

them from the second. In a more traditional biographical account there would

probably have been a place for them. Recording and recounting one’s dreams

was a well-established practice for sultans as well as saints, who wanted to

tell their life stories. Such dreams had their own conventions, most

significantly the appearance of sacred personalities, prophets, and saints, as

genuinely

256 Muslim Voice

spiritual interventions. The dreamer and perhaps a wider

audience could interpret such dreams as divine validation. Using dreams as a way of uncovering retrospectively the fears and

desires of childhood and recapitulating the developing self does not

appear to have been a feature of an Islamic “dream culture”; it suggests

a different idea about the changes an individual’s personality undergoes

over time. But if such a suggestion is warranted, it was not one that either

Sayyid Ahmad or Hali were prepared to pursue. In earlier periods of

Sayyid Ahmad’s life he had edited and produced a handwritten copy

(1846) and later a printed version (1862) of Jahangir’s memoirs, a text

notable for the vivid dreams it recounts and the paintings that they

inspired.6 If Sayyid Ahmad’s own dream collection can be read as a

legitimate autobiographical text, how do they relate to a South Asian

Muslim “dream culture”, the tradition of dreaming and dream

interpretation that he knew so well? And where do they stand as a

reflection of his own self-understanding and what he might be prepared

to present to his significantly large public following and opposition in the

modern world that he had done so much to come to grips with? Sayyid Ahmad published his commentary on Sura Yusuf in 1892, when

he was about 75 years old; it was included in the fifth volume in the

Stroumsa, eds., Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

6 Sachau, Ed, and Hermann Ethne, eds., Catalogue of the Persian, Turkish, Hindustani,

and Pushtu Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Part I: Persian Manuscripts (Oxford at

the Clarendon Press 1889], [No. 221, p. 118 [Elliot 406]; Toozuk-i Jehangeeree

(Allygurh: Private Press, 1863). For the significance of Jahangir’s dreams and fantasies,

see in this volume, A. Azfar Moin, “Painted Rituals: The Sacred Art of Jahangir”. See

also Husain, Mahmud, trans., The Dreams of Tipu Sultan (Karachi: Pakistan Historical

Society, n.d.); Alam, Muzaffar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Envisioning Power: The

Political Thought of a Late Eighteenth-Century Mughal Prince”, Indian Economic Social

History Review, Vol. 43 (2006), pp. 151–53. Dream accounts are mentioned throughout

Metcalf, Barbara Daly, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860– 1900 (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1982). For an interesting and possibly relevant discussion of

the “autobiographical” aspects of an older sufi text, see Ernst, Carl W., RûzbihânBaqlî:

Mysticism and the Rhetoric of Sainthood in Persian Sufism (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon

Press, 1996), pp. 80–93; and several essays in Marlow, Louise, ed., Dreaming across

Boundaries: The Interpretation of Dreams in Islamic Lands (Boston, Mass.: Ilex

Foundation, 2008).


series that had started 10 years earlier. That indicates that he

probably wrote down his dreams in the previous year or two, even

though the dream about the div is presented as one he remembered

from early childhood. Did prisoners in Delhi wear uniforms (jail khane

ke kapre) in the early 1820s? Probably not; at least in British India

there were none till the 1850s.7 This suggests that the dream, filtered

through the many intervening years, tells us at least as much about

the old man as the young one. We have to read this and the other

dreams from the perspectives of the time they were written down, as

well as the time when they supposedly took place. The lifetime of Sayyid Ahmad Khan spans great transformations, the

penetration into India of new technologies and economies of social

relationships under the aegis of the British imperial state. British military

and industrial power, political institutions, and systems of knowledge

overthrew longstanding practices and beliefs, including those associated

with the Mughal dynasty, whose shadowy presence was violently erased

midway in Sayyid Ahmad’s long life in 1857. Sayyid Ahmad’s creative

engagement with these transformations from publications, organizations,

educational institutions, and the formulation of intellectual discourses

about history, politics, science, and religion all taken together came to

embody an Indian Muslim version of the “modern”. With respect to

religion, this would-be modernity made the claim that the fundamental

principles of the Qur’an were consistent with, and even constitutive of,

contemporary natural science and systematic analysis otherwise

associated with Europe. In order to make this argument, however, it was

necessary to call into question established sources of religious

authority— the texts and textual practices associated with the `ulama—

by resorting to historical evidence and independent reasoning, Though

viewed by his critics as derivative and apologetic, Sayyid Ahmad’s ideas

and activities, as they developed over the course of his lifetime, represent

new and enduring formulations of subjectivity and group identity among

Indian Muslims.8

7 Anderson, Clare, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality, and Colonialism in South Asia (Oxford,

New York: Berg, 2004), p. 107.

8 For recent discussions in an extensive literature on Sayyid Ahmad Khan and “Islamic

modernism”, see Devji, Faisal, “Apologetic Modernity”, Modern Intellectual History, Vol.

4, No. 1 (2007), pp. 61–76; Moaddel, Mansoor, Islamic Modernism, Nationalism,

258 Muslim Voice

Barbara Metcalf has set a formidable standard for a biographical

study of a figure like Sayyid Ahmad Khan: that it “stretch our sense of

human possibility”, that it eschew “the unfolding linear story”, “the

canonical form of male biography and autobiography that emerged in

Europe” and be grounded instead in an awareness of “the distinctive

Indo-Persian cultural and literary tradition with its own conventions of

writing and thinking about life histories”.9 It would not do, for example, to

follow the hint in my title by trying to fit Sayyid Ahmad Khan into Erik

Erickson’s biographical model, sensitive as it may have been to cultural

context, with its stages of life and identity crises.10

To be clear: I have no

interest in comparing Sayyid Ahmad Khan with Martin Luther or the quest

for an Islamic protestant reformation. Hali, however, made a conscious

effort to introduce a new approach to biographical writing that shared

something of the linear metanarrative of the modern west. The purpose

of a “biography,” he said, was to reveal the moral qualities (akhlaq) and

thoughts of its “hero” but that requires an effort to show how they

developed.11

Unlike the exemplary life stories that Metcalf has studied,

however, Hali organized his book as a chronological account of individual

development and social change. In this sense he partakes of the larger

project that a writer like Erikson theorized and practiced a half century

later in his classic studies of Luther and Gandhi: to interpret how the

struggles and transformations of an individual’s life are intertwined with

intimate social relations and the wider contexts of history, and how they

may occasionally emerge into new ways of understanding and living that

are meaningful to the wider society. At the same time,

and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2005). 9 Metcalf, Barbara Daly, “Narrating Lives: A Mughal Empress, a French Nabob, a

Nationalist Muslim Intellectual”, Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and

Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 340–43. See also Metcalf,

“The Past in the Present: Instruction, Pleasure, and Blessing in Maulana

Muhammad Zakariyya’s Aap Biitii”, in David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn,

eds., Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History

(Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 116–43. 1 0 Erikson, Erik H., Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1958).

1 1 HJ, p. 55. I have used quotation marks to show that Hali uses the English words.


however, Hali held on to other features that Metcalf identifies with South

Asian Muslim traditions. As David Mathews pointed out, Hayat-i Javid is

structured somewhat like the biographical accounts in a tazkira, dividing

the life from the work and deploying anecdotes to draw relevant

lessons.12

The overall purpose of the book was to use Sayyid Ahmad’s

“life” as a model (namuna) for Muslims, as in the tradition, but it is now

addressed to a newly conceived Muslim qaum, an ethnic collectivity, in

the face of foreign rule and new cultural challenges.13

Here is the second dream in the series:

He would have been ten years old or perhaps a bit more. He dreamed that he was

going from the house where he stayed to his maternal grandfather’s house, which

was just across the street. There in front stood a very large elephant; sitting on top,

someone was beating it to make it run. He hurried across, pushing into his

grandfather’s house. A little after that he went into a garden house above the

bazaar or street to see if the elephant had gone away so that he could go home.

The elephant happened to be standing just below. It wrapped him in its trunk and

threw him on to the cushion on its back. On the cushion there was a man, who laid

him out and began to cut his throat with a knife. But it didn’t cut. The elephant

driver said, “He’s a Sayyid. You can’t cut the neck from the front. Cut it from the

side.” He turned him over and put the knife in his neck. At that moment Sayyid said

the full kalima. That cruel man couldn’t make the knife go in. Then there appeared

from the direction of the qibla [toward Mecca] a person dressed in green and

carrying a green staff in his hand. He struck the cruel man forcefully with his staff.

Along with the elephant, he was annihilated. Sayyid, as it were, fell from its back

on to the ground and woke up. If really that cruel man had killed [him], what a good

death that would have been.

If Sayyid Ahmad was 10 when he had this dream, or at least if the dream

reaches back as a memory of that time, it would have been close to the death

of his 80-year old nânâ, maternal grandfather, Khwaja Fariduddin Ahmad, on

July 27, 1828.14 Khwaja Farid and the residence in

1 2

1 3

1 4

Mathews, David J., “Translator’s Preface” to Altaf Husayn Hali, Hayat-i-Javed (A Biography of Sir Sayyid), David J. Mathews, trans. (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 1994), pp. xv–xvi. HJ, p. 29. His date of birth is given as 1747. Khan, Sayyid Ahmad, in Panipati, Maqalat, Vol. 16,

pp. 636, 667 [hereafter SF]; Zein-ool-Abudeen to F. Hawkins, Acting Resident, 3 April

260 Muslim Voice which he lived loomed larger in Sayyid Ahmad’s dreams and received

greater recognition in his writings than anything to do with his own father,

Sayyid Muhammad Mutaqqi Khan.15

When he was just 20 years old, he

wrote an account of his family background as a preface to Jâm-i Jam (The

Cup of Jamshed), a tabular summary of the Timurid dynasty.16

In the final

volume of The History of India, As Told by Its Own Historians, H.M. Elliot

offered some characteristically arch comments about the author’s “pride

of ancestry” but it is notable that Sayyid Ahmad was more concerned to

claim Mughal connections than a religious lineage; his account goes into

detail only about Khwaja Farid as a widely traveled, learned man notable

for his British friendships.17

Although later references to his genealogy emphasize the religious

significance of his more distant Sayyid ancestors in the form of a nasab nama

(pedigree) that ultimately was inscribed over his grave,18 it is his Kashmiri

maternal grandfather who continues to draw his devoted attention. In 1844,

he published an Urdu translation of Khwaja Farid’s Persian treatise on the

geometrical compass, with an introduction about his grandfather’s travels and

European associations.19 Three years later,

1 5

1 6

1 7

1 8

1 9

1830, Political Consultations [IOR/F/4/1268/50911?], 16 April, 1830 in Jatindra

Kumar Majumdar, Raja Rammohun Roy and the Last Moghuls: A Selection from

Official Records, 1803–1859 (Calcutta: Art Press, 1939), pp. 333–34.

Hali calls him Mir Mutaqqi, but see Iftikhar Alam Khan, Sar Sayyid, darun-i khanah

(Aligarh: Ejukeshanal Buk Ha¼us, 2006), pp. 16–17. I have benefitted greatly from this

book and from Professor Iftikhar’s generous friendship and extensive research on all

matters concerning Sir Sayyid and the early history of the Aligarh movement. Panipati,

Muhammad Isma‘il, ed., Maqalat-i Sir Sayyid (Lahore: Majlis-i Taraqqi-i Adab, 1965),

Vol. 16, pp. 18–20. Cf. Elliot, H. M., and John Dowson, The History of India, as Told by

Its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period (London: Trübner and Co., 1877), Vol. 8,

pp. 430–31. For the manuscript of this text, perhaps in SAK’s own hand, see Rieu,

Charles, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, (London: British

Museum, 1966), Vol. 1, Or. 145, pp. 284–85. (Thanks to C.M. Naim.) One year after

Jam-i Jam, Sayyid Muhammad, Sayyid Ahmad’s elder brother, made a handsomely

illuminated manuscript copy of the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, which includes a colophon with

the similar genealogical information about the family’s history (India Office mss. Eth ,

No. 2833); see also the colophon at pp. 762–4/folios 406–407 of Sayyid Ahmad’s own

manuscript of the same text, completed in 1846, loc. cit., Sachau and Ethé, Catalogue

I: No. 221, p. 118 [Elliot 406]. See Appendix No. 1 to HJ, p. 737.

Fawa’id al-af kar fi I’mal al farjar, in Panipati, Maqalat, Vol. 15, pp. 98–99. Specifically,


he included his grandfather’s name and titles, along with his own and those

of his father, in an elaborate medallion design on the cover of his book about

Delhi, Asar us-sanadid (1847), his ambitious description of the city of Delhi

and its environs.20 Accounts of his maternal grandfather were repeated in all

later autobiographical statements, such as The Loyal Muhammadans of India

(1860), written in the wake of the Great Rebellion.21

In 1885, his friend Lieutenant-Colonel G. F. I. Graham of the Indian

Police published an English biography of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, based on

years of conversation and the compilation of published materials. The book

starts off with an account of Khwaja Farid’s sojourn in Calcutta, his service to

the East India Company in Persia and Burma, his “eight or nine years” as

“prime minister” at the Mughal court, and his friendship with David Ochterlony.

If some of the information was a bit distorted, such as the length of time

Khwaja Farid served the Mughal court, it isn’t clear who is responsible. Sayyid

Ahmad was pleased and arranged to have the book translated into Urdu.22

About this time he began making his own inquiries about the precise date of

his grandfather’s death and the details of his career.23 Finally, in 1896, almost

80, Sayyid Ahmad published a small, handsomely lithographed book about

Khwaja Fariduddin.24 Hali used this material, along with Sayyid Ahmad’s

notes

2 0

2 1

2 2

2 3

2 4

Sayyid Ahmad mentions Claude Martin, John Baillie, and Gore Ouseley,

among others. Facsimile edition (Aligarh: Sir Syed Academy, Aligarh Muslim University,

2007). I am indebted to Professor Asghar Abbas for providing me with a

copy of this publication.

An account of the loyal Mahomedans of India, Part I (Meerut: Printed by

J. A. Gibbons, Mofussilite Press, 1860), p. 11. Correspondence between SAK and Graham from 1885–88 in the 2nd

edn, The Life and Work of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (London: Hodder &

Stoughton, 1909), pp. 268–74. I have not seen the translation by Haji

Isma‘il Khan Sherwani that Sayyid Ahmad mentions in his letters. SAK to Hakim Ahmad uddin, 6 December 1884; he also asks for the date of his father’s

death. Maktubât, Vol. 1, p. 10; see footnote by Panipati. Also SAK to Graham, December

1888, 2nd edn of The Life and Work, p. 273, referring to relevant papers of William

Linnaeus Gardner (one of William Dalrymple’s “white Mughals”). Khan, Sayyid Ahmad, Sirat-i Faridiyah (Agra: Matba»-i Mufid-i »Am, 1896). The

production of this book is in notable contrast to the less aesthetically motivated

publications of the Aligarh Institute Press. References in this paper are to SF (the

262 Muslim Voice as well as interviews for his own biographical account of his subject’s

early years, published in 1901, three years after Sir Sayyid’s death.

Sayyid Ahmad had included his grandfather’s haveli among the notable

buildings of Delhi in the first edition of Asar us-sanadid. The former residence

of an earlier Mughal official, more recently purchased by Khwaja Farid, it was

located on the side of the broad Faiz Bazaar, second only to Chandni Chowk

as the most impressive avenue in the city.25 In a note at the beginning of the

biography, Hali explains that this was a large complex of buildings; like the

nearby qila-i mu‘alla of the Mughals it included a divan khana (hall of

audience), horse and elephant stables, along with other structures and open

spaces. When Sayyid Mutaqqi married Khwaya Farid’s daughter, he moved

from a dilapidated residence at the edge of the Jama Masjid into a building in

this complex.26 This indicates that his maternal grandfather was very much

the head of the extended household in which Sayyid Ahmad was raised.27

Sayyid Ahmad Khan represents Khwaja Farid as the exemplification of

adab, possessing cultivated manners, aesthetic and intellectual adeptness.28

He presided over the morning meal in the ni’mat khana, the dining room

(literally, the abode of luxury), in the women’s quarters with all the sons,

daughters, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. As Sayyid Ahmad recalled,

there were some 14 or 15 close relatives, his brother Sayyid Muhammad, six

years older, and the children of his mother’s brothers and sisters.29 Khwaja

Farid took his evening meals outside in the divan khana, turning it into a

zenana so that Sayyid Ahmad’s mother and her sister could serve him. In the

evening, after the candles

2 5

2 6

2 7

2 8

2 9

Panipati ed., Maqalat, Vol. 16, pp. 627–96). I have also consulted the edition edited

by Mahmud Ahmad Barkati (Karachi: PakAcademy, 1964), which has some useful

notes along with much hostile commentary. See also the English translation by

Christopher Shackle in Islamic Culture, Vol. 46 (1972), pp. 307–36. The most

careful summary of information about Sir Sayyid’s family is to be found in Khan,

Iftikhar »Alam, Sar Sayyid, darun-i khana. 1847 edn, Part III, p. 31 [marked as p. 371 in the facsimile edition]. HJ, pp. 39, 42. Iftikhar Alam Khan estimates that the wedding may have

taken place about 1805: Sar Sayyid, darun-i Khanah, p. 17. My interpretation here differs from Khan, Sar Sayyid, darun-i khana, pp. 25–

27. Metcalf, Barbara Daly, Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab

in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). HJ, p. 57. Hali bases this information on notes that he received from Sayyid Ahmad.


had been lit, he summoned his paternal and maternal

grandchildren to recite their lessons, which could be a frightening

experience, not only because a mistake would result in his

disapproval but also because their feet had to be especially clean

so as not to smudge the clean, white cloth they sat on.30

At some point, however, Sayyid Ahmad’s mother—not his father— had

a separate haveli built across the street; from then on, as in the dream, he

had to have a servant take him across.31 It isn’t clear, however, when this

took place. An incident described by both Graham and Hali might have

something to do with the fear that Sayyid Ahmad remembered, in his dreams

about entering into his grandfather’s space. Once he discovered his

grandfather with General Ochterlony, who was in “full dress,” sitting in

European fashion on a chair. The boy, perhaps five or six years old, tried to

get away, but the General called him back. When Sayyid Ahmad told the story

late in life, he asked Ochterlony why he wore feathers in his hat and two rows

of buttons on his coat. The General just smiled. Sayyid Ahmad liked to show

a reproduction of a painting (now in the British Library) of his grandfather

standing side by side with Ochterlony at a Mughal darbar.32 Pride and

amusement had overtaken any anxiety he might have felt as a young child.

When Sayyid Ahmad’s father, Sayyid Mutaqqi, makes an appearance in Hali’s

biography, he is characterized as living a life of untroubled freedom,

occasionally visiting his friend Akbar II in court, leading bands of boys

including Sayyid Ahmad and his brother to swim in the Jamuna, but mostly

devoted to the Naqshbandi khanqah of Shah Ghulam `Ali.33 Sayyid Mutaqqi

had a title and received a stipend from the Mughal court; he

3 0

3 1

3 2

3 3

SF, pp. 671–73. HJ [1965 edn], p. 57. Graham, 1885 edn, pp. 2–4; Sirat-i Faridiyah, Panipati edn, pp.662–63.

Ochterlony died in 1825 when SAK was seven years old; see Coleman, A. P.,

“Ochterlony, Sir David, first baronet (1758–1825),” Oxford Dictionary of National

Biography (Oxford University Press, September 2004); online edition (October

2008), available at http:/ /www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20492. See “Durbar at

Delhi of Akbar II”, inscribed with the names of Mughal princes, courtiers, and Sir

David Ochterlony, c.1820, British Library, Prints and Drawings, Add.Or.3079; one

of the figures, standing to the right of Ochterlony, is marked as “Khwaja Farid

Khan”; see http:// www.imagesonline.bl.uk/results.asp?image=068074 HJ, pp.

41, 58–59.

264 Muslim Voice

occasionally brought his son there as well as to the shrine. There is virtually no mention of relatives on the father’s side of

Sayyid Ahmad’s family.34

Atique Siddiqi characterized Sayyid Ahmad in his youth as a darbari,

a courtier.35

That is a fair enough description of Sayyid Mutaqqi, but

Khwaja Farid’s story is more complicated. According to Sayyid Ahmad,

Khwaja Farid’s grandfather came to Delhi from Kashmir as a merchant of

shawls and other handicrafts and proprietor of a large silk workshop. One

of seven brothers, Khwaja Farid had gone off to Lucknow around 1790 to

study with a mathematician there; he had gone on to Calcutta, held

various positions under the East India Company that included foreign

travel and a lucrative post as tahsildar in Bundelkhand. He had a large

library, including English books that bore his own annotations.36

It may

have been due to his son-in-law that he took service in the Mughal court,

but fairly briefly in two stints, 1814–15, 1817–19, after which he never set

foot there again, but, according his son, became a “recluse” (darvaish).37

That is somewhat inconsistent with Sayyid Ahmad’s memories and other

sources, but one of Khwaja Farid’s brothers was a prominent Rasul

Shahi, a Sufi devotee of the wahdat-i wujud (unity of being) philosophy of

Ibn al-Arabi. Sayyid Ahmad described him as intensely ascetic and

antisocial; he seems to have lived among the Meos in Alwar before

returning to a solitary cell (hujra) in Delhi. Sayyid Ahmad recalled that his

grandfather late in life briefly emulated the Rasul Shahi practice of

shaving the entire body.38

3 4

3 5

3 6

3 7

3 8

Ibid., p. 41; Sayyid Ahmad’s older sister appears to have married another Sayyid,

who served as a tutor to the mother of Agha Mirza (Sarwar Jang); Agha Mirza’s

mother was the daughter of Khalil Ullah, who was married to SAK’s mother’s sister.

Karnama-i sarwari (Aligarh: Matbu‘a Muslim University, 1933), p. 2. Siddiqi, M. Atique, Sar Sayyid Ahmad Khan ek siyasi mutala»ah (Na¼i Dihle: Maktabah- yi Jami»ah, 1977), p. 14. SF, pp. 636–62. Ibid., p. 657; Majumdar, Raja Rammohun Roy and the Last Moghuls, pp. 333–34,

where Khwaja Farid is described as mukhtar, not vazir. He is also mentioned in

Marchioness of Bute, ed., The Private Journal of the Marquess of Hastings, 3rd

edn (Allahabad: Panini Office, 1907), p. 136; also see references in Pernau,

Margrit, and Yunus Jaffery, Information and the Public Sphere: Persian

Newsletters from Mughal Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). SF, pp. 673–74; Sir Syed Academy ed., .Asar us-sanadid, pp. 464–66; see also Mayaram,


The street (sarak) that young Sayyid Ahmad had to cross was no doubt

the one in his dream. It is also the street that his mother put him out on as a

punishment for slapping a servant.39 That raises the question of demarcating

space as public or private or perhaps something else.40 If the road had

prisoners and a stranger’s elephant, did that mean it was public space? Delhi

was still arranged in what Narayani Gupta calls a “hierarchy of Chinese

boxes,” so that each mahalla had its own gate.41 The study of social space is

a matter of who can go where and what they can do in different places at

different times, but it isn’t clear what this meant for Sayyid Ahmad at different

stages of his youth. At one side of the haveli was a broad, public boulevard,

the Faiz Bazaar, a place of shops and processions, which stretched from the

Red Fort to the Delhi Gate. On the other side were smaller roads that led to

the nearby shrine of Shah Ghulam `Ali and the madrasa of Shah ̀ Abdul `Aziz,

both mentioned as significant to different members of the family. Mosques

large and small including the Jama Masjid itself were not far away.

If Sayyid Ahmad could cross the street, even though it took a servant to

accompany him, what about the women in his family? He tells us that his

mother, ‘Aziz un-nisa Begam, not only attended meals in her father’s house

but visited many other houses as well. As a favored daughter and sister, she

no doubt had a higher status than a daughter-in-law might be expected to

have in her husband’s household. Still, there seems to have been some sort

of separation, and one might expect that Sayyid Ahmad’s father would have

had less access to Khwaja Farid’s residence.

Khwaja Farid, the grandson of a merchant from Kashmir,

adventurous, learned, well-traveled and wealthy, had married his

daughters to husbands who had higher religious status—so long as the

3 9

4 0

4 1

Shail, Against History, against State: Counterperspectives from the Margins (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), p. 39. SF, p. 683. See Freitag, Sandria B., Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and

the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1989); Devji, Faisal F., “Gender and the Politics of Space”,

in Zoya Hasan, ed., Forging Identities (New Delhi: Kali, 1993), pp. 22–37. Gupta, Narayani, “The Indomitable City”, in Eckart Ehlers and Thomas

Krafft, Shâhjahânâbad, Old Dehli: Tradition and Colonial Change (New

Delhi: Manohar, 2003), p. 32. See also other articles in this collection.

266 Muslim Voice

daughter stayed at home or at least close to it.42

Sayyid Ahmad’s father

had an independent income, including perhaps some property; but most

of all he offered his status as a Sayyid to a family that was, it seems, of

less prestigious ancestry. In all his accounts of his maternal grandfather

from the age of 20, Sayyid Ahmad has nothing to say about his

genealogy, the point of emphasis with respect to his paternal side. Only

near the end of his life when he wrote the biography of his grandfather

did he insert the claim that the maternal lineage was not in fact

indigenously Kashmiri but rather a descendant of Abu Ya‘aqub Hamdani

from Yemen and Merv, whose descendants migrated to Kashmir.43

He

doesn’t go into further detail or mention, as one might expect, any

connection with Sayyid ‘Ali Hamdani, the Shah-i Hamdani who is such a

major figure in Kashmiri religious history. Hali passes over the matter

lightly.44

What was significant about Khwaja Farid was his own

personality and achievements. As a younger brother, a maternal grandson, living across the street,

Sayyid Ahmad was treated with affection but perhaps was aware of his

slightly lower status as a relative being compensated, as in his dream, by

his lineage as a Sayyid. There is a hint in the account he gave to Hali of

some greater tension. He remembered frequent fights. Once when a

cousin was urinating, Sayyid Ahmad snuck up behind him and knocked

him over, and another time he slammed down so hard on another

cousin’s finger that it took days to recover.45

After the death of his grandfather, on the other hand, he seems to

have found a mentor in one of his mother’s brothers, Khwaja Zain ul-

Abdin Khan. This maternal uncle was a student and practitioner of

astronomy and music, who made his own instruments for both and took

his young nephew along to the famous if slightly risqué gatherings of

Delhi musicians and dancers. He also taught him archery.46

4 2

4 3

4 4

4 5

4 6

Khan, Iftikhar Ahmad, Sar Sayyid, darun-i khanah, pp. 48, 397. (See also

references to the biography of Sami Ullah Khan, note 52, and the

autobiography of Sarwar Jang, note 34.)

SF, pp. 634–35. HJ, p. 43. Ibid., p. 58. SF, pp. 676–80.


There is another dream related to this period of his youth:

He must have been fourteen or fifteen years old, more or less, anyway the time he

was learning archery. Some relatives had returned from the hajj. He saw that they

had gone away to the bazaar. People said to him, you were going to go on the hajj;

didn’t you go? They said that there were not now many days left for the hajj. People

said that three or four days were left. He said, I’m going, and he rose up high off

the ground and started to fly toward Mecca. He passed over the city, got to an

open field and passed over it, got to the ocean and passed over it and then came

down at the gate of a mosque and went inside. It was the courtyard of a rather

small mosque and in front of it there was a roof [sa‘iban] and wooden columns and

grass mats spread out on the floor. There an elder was seated, head bent down,

with a black beard and a white sheet [chadar] flying. He didn’t say anything, but he

gave him three things. One was a red cornelian thumb ring [shast] which you put

on to hold an arrow; and he gave two other things which Sayyid couldn’t remember.

He took these things and left. In the middle of the mosque courtyard another man

was standing, tall of stature, thin body. Sayyid asked him who it was that was sitting

in the mosque. He said, what, don’t you know that it is Hazrat ‘Ali! Sayyid turned

around and ran so that he could kiss his feet, but while he was running he woke

up and still in the dream the idea came to him that the person he had asked was

Hazrat ‘Umar.

Sayyid Ahmad draws here on the standard conventions of a good

Islamic dream, a dream designed to assure himself and others of his

spiritual credentials. There is, first of all, an allusion to the Prophet’s

ascension, the mir‘aj, if only by daylight. Then there is a meeting with

sacred personages, Hazrat ‘Ali and Hazrat ‘Umar. In having such a

dream, he leaves his relatives behind in the bazaar but also gains the

magical assistance of Hazrat ‘Ali in his quest to master the art of archery,

an expertise shared by his father and his maternal uncle.

Hazrat ‘Ali intervenes in the next dream as well, this time to save

Sayyid Ahmad from temptation after the death of his father in 1838.

With the termination of income from the Mughal court, Sayyid Ahmad

had the idea that some of his mother’s real estate could be sold for

cash, and the cash could be loaned out for interest. In a long dream,

‘Ali tells him not to swim in muddy waters, that is, not to violate the

shari‘a prohibition against lending money for profit. Of the 12 dreams in the collection, the final five involve the

268 Muslim Voice Naqshbandi saint Shah Ghulam ‘Ali and his successors. In a note at the

end of the dream texts, Hali recalls Sayyid Ahmad telling him that he

wanted his “Life”, that is, his biography to mention his strong attachment

to Shah Ghulam ‘Ali. He offered as evidence a Persian treatise that he

published in 1852 defending the meditative practice of tasawwur-i shaikh,

of visualizing one’s spiritual guide. Sayyid Ahmad told Hali that Shah

Ahmad Sa‘id himself, successor to Shah Ghulam ‘Ali, had approved the

treatise; it was evidence that Sayyid Ahmad was among the ahl-i hal, the

people who have achieved a mystical state. In the treatise, Sayyid Ahmad

argued that one could only achieve spiritual fulfillment through

companionship, that love is a condition of receiving divine inspiration, and

that one can cultivate the love of God by silent meditation, muraqaba and

visualizing one’s spiritual guide. He goes on to deny that this is an

illegitimate innovation, bid‘at, and that it really deviates from the values of

Shah Isma‘il, the great Delhi preacher from the family of Shah Wali Allah.

What Sayyid Ahmad doesn’t say, is that his treatise was in fact a

response to Shah Isma‘il’s condemnation of tasawwur-i shaikh, written on

behalf of his own spiritual guide and fellow jihadi martyr, Sayyid Ahmad

Barelwi.47

According to Sayyid Ahmad, his maternal relatives were predominantly

associated with the madrasa of Shah ‘Abdul ‘Aziz, son of Shah Wali Allah. His

father, mother and elder brother, on the other hand, were attached to the

khanqah of Shah Ghulam ‘Ali.48 Shah Ghulam ‘Ali himself presided over

Sayyid Ahmad’s bismillah but he was to study with members of Shah ‘Abd al-

‘Aziz’s family. Both centers were near the haveli of Khwaja Farid, and both

derived their ideas and practices from the renewal movement of the

Naqshbandi tradition. During the early 19th century, however, there

developed an increasingly strong antagonism in their interpretation of how to

reconcile sufi thought and practice with

4 7

4 8

Panipati, ed., Maqalat, Vol. 15, p. 181; Lawrence, Bruce B., “Mystical and Rational Elements in the Early Religious Writings of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan”, in Bruce B. Lawrence, ed., The Rose and the Rock: Mystical and Rational Elements in the Intellectual History of South Asian Islam (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Programs in Comparative Studies on Southern Asia [and] Islamic and Arabian Development Studies, 1979). SF, p. 687.


the shari‘a.49

This was not simply of matter of ‘ulama versus Sufis,

nor was it always clear which side was more severe with respect to

folk practices. Sayyid Ahmad says that his mother, like the followers

of Shah Ghulam ‘Ali, objected to amulets marked with chicken blood

to ward off disease; a practice supposedly associated with the family

of Shah ‘Abd al-‘Aziz that her family subscribed to.50

In one of his

dreams, set in his mid-20s, Sayyid Ahmad goes to the khanqah to

receive bay‘at, spiritual initiation. All the saints are there, starting with

Mirza Mazhar. Sayyid Ahmad says that before receiving bay‘at, he

wants to be assured that it is in accordance with the shari‘a:

Miyan Mazhar spoke, “Look gentlemen! He is talking like a Wahhabi!” Shah

Abu Sa`id sahib angrily replied, “A person wants to follow the sunnat, and you

call him names and say he is talking like a Wahhabi?” After that he turned to

Sayyid and said to him that there is nothing against the sunnat in the

Naqshbandi tariqa, and Sayyid said, “Very good.” The same dream raised another anxiety:

Then Sayyid took out five rupees and made an offering to Shah Abu Sa‘id sahib

and five rupees to Shah Ahmad Sa‘id sahib. Both gentlemen took the offering.

When he gave an offering to Shah ‘Abdul Ghani sahib, he was told, “You are in

British service, so I won’t take it.” Sayyid said, “This is not money from my wages;

I borrowed it from a Hindu.” This also he refused to accept. Shah Abu Sa‘id sahib

said, “If he doesn’t take it then send it to his mother.” After this conversation, the

occasion for bay‘at did not arrive before he woke up. The traditional ideology of Shah Ghulam ‘Ali was hostile to wealth and

ruling power, and avoided contact with British rule. The position of Shah

‘Abd al-‘Aziz was more ambiguous but certainly not enthusiastic about

cooperating with foreign power.51

Unless we take General Ochterlony

4 9

5 0

5 1

Troll, Christian W., Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A Reinterpretation of Muslim

Theology (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978), pp. 28–42; Fusfeld,

Warren, “The Boundaries of Islam and Infidelity”, in Katherine P. Ewing, ed.,

Shari»at and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1988), pp. 205–19; Malik, Jamal, “Islamic Institutions and

Infrastructure in Shahjahanabad”, in Ehlers and Krafft, Old Delhi, pp. 71–92. HJ, p. 61; SF, pp. 687–88. Fusfeld, Warren Edward, “The Shaping of Sufi Leadership in Delhi: The

270 Muslim Voice

as Sayyid Ahmad’s div, this is the only dream that alludes to

British rule in India. Sayyid Ahmad recalled that his family opposed his wish to join British

service; in the absence of family networks, he may have had some

difficulty. Fortunately for him, another relative, also with a good religious

pedigree who had married into Khwaja Farid’s family, was already serving

as a sadr amin (subordinate judge) in Delhi and was in a position to get

the young man started.52

It is around this time that Sayyid Ahmad married

the daughter of his mother’s sister, Parsa Begum. Parsa Begum’s father

is identified as Khwaja Naqib al-Awliya Ghulam ‘Ali; in other words, the

leader of the friends of Ghulam ‘Ali, who appears to have been yet

another religiously connected son-in-law living in or just next to the haveli

of Khwaja Farid.53

At the time of the 1857 Rebellion, Parsa Begam was

living with her mother and mother-in-law on property that belonged to the

three of them. Another one of Sayyid Ahmad’s dreams takes place four

years after that great cataclysm:

His wife died in Moradabad. Some days later he had a dream in which she

was sitting in a very fine house, wearing a very fine green garment, and her

body and face were glowing like the moon. Sayyid wanted to touch her with

his hand. She said, no hand can touch this body. The body and dress are

spiritual [nurani], they are not the body and dress of this world.

No doubt Sayyid Ahmad had many other dreams, but to learn more about

the women in his life one has to turn to the well-known account of his mother

at the conclusion of Sirat-i Faridiyah, the biography of Khwaja

5 2

5 3

Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya, 1750 to 1920” (PhD thesis, University of

Pennsylvania, 1981), pp. 164–66; Metcalf, Islamic Revival, pp. 5–51. HJ, p. 67, referring to SAK’s khalu, mother’s sister’s husband, Khalil Allah Khan,

who was apparently father’s brother of Sami Allah Khan, a clue to this significant

relationship. Cf. Khan, Sar Sayyid, darun-i khanah, pp. 48, 397; Z2aka¼ullah,

Muhammad, Savanih »umri Haji Muhòammad Sami»ullah Khan Bahadur, Si. Em.

Ji, reprint of 1907 original (Lakhna¼u [Lucknow]: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akadmi,

1997), p. 8. According to Zaka Allah, Sami Allah’s father, that is, Khalil Allah’s

brother, was closely associated with David Ochterlony.

See Khan, Sar Sayyid, darun-i khanah, p. 47. Even after Khwaja Farid’s

death, the house was known by his name: see Asar us-sanadid, 1847

edn, Part III, p. 31 [marked as p. 371 in the facsimile edition].


Farid that Sayyid Ahmad wrote toward the end of his life. In many respects it

partakes of the classic biographical conventions that Barbara Metcalf has

called to our attention, an effort to set forth an exemplary personality through

anecdotes and wise sayings. She is depicted as wise, independent minded,

practical and caring. She had read the Qur’an and the introductory Persian

texts and could be counted as one of Sayyid Ahmad’s own teachers. Clearly

she had a great deal of financial autonomy, setting aside five per cent of her

income to assist the poor and managing her household and property. Her

devotion to Shah Ghulam ‘Ali meant that she did not believe in elaborate

rituals, and that she overcame adversity because of a confident sense of

harmony with God. As a mother she could have been a strong disciplinarian

but also a wise counselor. She was willing to flout convention, as when she

visited the homes of poor women including ones who for one reason or

another were considered disreputable, and in providing encouragement and

assistance to widows who wanted to remarry.

Such is Sayyid Ahmad’s description of his mother. It ends,

however, with the terrible story of her suffering after the British had

retaken Delhi in 1857, when her house was ransacked and relatives

were murdered. She and her sister were reduced to living in the small

room that had once been provided for a poor old lady, one of the

objects of her charity. They had to eat horse’s grain and had no water

to drink. Finally her son, Sayyid Ahmad, came to the rescue and

managed to get her to Meerut, where he was stationed. She died

there shortly afterwards, though happily surrounded by her son and

daughter, daughters-in-law and grandchildren.54

Sayyid Ahmad’s sentimental account of his mother reads very much like

the literature of his time though she seems to me to be a stronger and more

independent woman than the heroines of Nazir Ahmad’s novels. Sayyid

Ahmad, at least at the end of his life, was truly what Atique Siddiqi said of his

younger years, a qadamat parast, a worshiper of the past. He was, of course,

notoriously opposed to sending women to school or introducing them to public

life.55 This then is another case,

5 4 SF, pp. 682–95; Minault, Gail, Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim Social

Reform in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 14–16. 5 5 Minault, Secluded Scholars, pp. 18–19, 30.

272 Muslim Voice now well-established, of male leaders seeking to use ideals of

women’s domesticity to ward off the challenges of colonial rule and

modernity, while denying a voice to women themselves.56

More

specifically, it is surely an example of what Ruby Lal has called the

“recuperation of respectability”, the effort to retain or revive the claims

of a fairly narrow social group to prestige and privilege.57

But this is the same Sayyid Ahmad Khan who once had so deeply

disparaged the Muslim family and household and had established the

college in Aligarh to rescue young men from the corruption of their homes.

If in old age he looked back, with conventional nostalgia, to his youth as

a better time than the present, there were also more specific reasons for

his turn to the past. The dreams he recorded and the biographical projects

he participated in coincide with, or at least anticipate, deep

disappointments—most of all with respect to his greatest experiment, his

son Sayyid Mahmud, whose forced resignation as a High Court Judge

had become a public scandal.

A year after Sayyid Ahmad died, a certain Viennese physician came up

with another way of thinking about dreams, as a way of uncovering

unconscious conflicts, rooted in early childhood, that undermine one’s sense

of autonomy and ability to love and work. But that was in another land and

another language, and as far as India is concerned, perhaps, part of a later

history. For now, we can read Sayyid Ahmad’s dreams as his way of showing

himself and ultimately a wider world that he was, whatever anyone might say,

a man inspired and validated by his religion and his cultural tradition in all he

had attempted to do as a thinker and a leader of Indian Muslims. It was, if you

like, a wish-fulfillment.

For example, see Sarkar, Tanika, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, Community, Religion,

and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Mani,

Lata, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1998). Lal, Ruby, “Gender and Sharafat: Rereading Nazir Ahmad”,Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,

young man sayyid: dreams and biographical texts

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